MIT VTP colleague Ron Rivest has an interesting new working paper out on his concept of “preliminary voting.” As the abstract of the paper states:

“We introduce the notion of preliminary voting, or pre-voting, wherein a voter deposits — perhaps over the Internet — a preliminary vote or a pre-vote with election authorities at some time before the close of elections. Prevotes are not official votes, and need not be kept private … With prevoting, a voter must visit a polling site to make any final adjustments to prevote in private, and to actually cast her (perhaps modified) prevote.”

This is a very provocative and interesting concept and working paper, well worth reading!